EPISODE 46
Work/Ride Balance
Ever dream of telling your boss, “I’ll be back in six months… or a year,” and pedaling off into the sunrise? Mike Vermeulen didn’t just do this once; he made a habit out of it. Join us for a wild ride as Mike explains his genius strategy: work for five years, then take a personal leave of absence – or quit if necessary – to cycle across a continent. From flying over the handlebars of a brake-less 10-speed on his first overnighter heading for the tip of Cape Cod to accomplishing the incredible feat of cycling across six continents, Mike has seen it all. He’s mostly gone solo but has also found riding partners on “companions wanted” forums and joined three classic Tour d’Afrique (now TDA Global) supported rides, including the last section of the inaugural Silk Route adventure. Tune in to discover how this compiler engineer hacked the code to optimize his work and bicycling careers, accidentally creating a masterclass in work/ride balance!
Episode Transcript
Mike: I definitely feel grateful for the two companies that I’ve worked for and that I’ve gotten four leaves of absence. There are probably circumstances that might be unique or special or certainly lucky in some ways. But I also think that sometimes there are some things that I think I did that I sort of got onto this sequence of being able to take these trips every four or five years.
Gabriel: You just heard Mike Vermeulen share his recipe for building a successful engineering career while simultaneously taking months and years off work to complete seven bicycle tours across six continents. Beginning with his trip from Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine in 1992, Mike began planning his next adventure “in about five years.” This pattern repeated itself until 2018 when Mike simply ran out of continents to explore. If the popular board game Ticket to Ride featured a bicycle edition, Mike would have drawn every one of the long route destination cards. Fairbanks, Alaska to Newfoundland, Canada, Amsterdam to Beijing via Vladivostok, Cairo to Cape Town. Prudhoe Bay to Ushuaia. With so many kilometers to cover, it’s no surprise that Mike’s stories make a record number of references to previous Accidental Bicycle Tourist episodes. And it all started with a tricycle, a teddy bear, a Dutch flag, and the desire to reach the edge of the patio.
Sandra: You’re listening to The Accidental Bicycle Tourist. In this podcast, you’ll meet people from all walks of life and learn about their most memorable bike touring experiences. This is your host, Gabriel Aldaz.
Gabriel: Hello, cycle touring enthusiasts! Welcome to another episode of The Accidental Bicycle Tourist podcast. As many of you know, we recently concluded the voting for your favorite episodes of the past year. To hear the results of the voting, please tune in to our coming up in late December. Thank you also for your helpful feedback about the show in general. I received several excellent suggestions for future guests on the podcast, for example. Listener Mike Vermeulen took it one step further. Mike wrote, “Over the course of my career, I’ve taken seven long breaks to bicycle across six continents. So I could discuss some or one of these, if you wish. Most recent ride was Madagascar in August.” Well, that is an offer I could not refuse. So Mike Vermeulen, thank you for suggesting yourself to be a guest on The Accidental Bicycle Tourist podcast.
Mike: Well, thank you and certainly enjoy the show and thank you for hosting and pleased to be on it.
Gabriel: Excellent. That actually is a great way to put my opening question, which is, how did you find out about the show?
Mike: I think I’ve done periodic searches in my app.”Bicycle,” “bicycle touring,” and those sorts of things. And it showed up. Certainly it’s been one that’s actually stayed on there. I’ll sometimes try a podcast and then switch it around and those sorts of things.
Gabriel: Well, great. Glad to be a fixture on your playlist. That’s an honor, as you’re obviously someone who has a lot of experience touring and hopefully can relate to some of the topics that the other guests bring up from time to time.
Mike: Yeah, it’s sort of interesting because on different shows will sort of hear someone in the say, I went on the Carretera Austral or bicycling in Russia or just different things and it’s like, oh, okay. Yeah, I can relate to some of those different areas also. And then it’s just always interesting to see just different perspectives that people have because everybody’s tour is sometimes just a little different or those sorts of things. But there’s also similarities sometimes.
Gabriel: Yeah, exactly. And I think one of the common threads is encouraging people to get out and do a tour. Your last name, Vermeulen, that’s the American way of saying it. And I saw on your website, there’s a picture of yourself as a small child on a tricycle, I think it is, holding the Dutch flag.
Mike: I used that photo to mockingly put it as, that was one of my first bicycle trips. And I’m there with my teddy bear and I made it to the edge of the patio. I’ve got my flag and I’m on my bike. A fitting start at least to bicycle trips.
Gabriel: Yeah, usually we go way back with the guest, but we’re going really way back with you on your first tour to the edge of the patio. Let’s just get the Dutch pronunciation of your last name so that we can get the Dutch heritage. Can you say it the proper way?
Mike: So my full name would be Michiel Vermeulen. That was also my grandfather’s name. I was born in the Netherlands and we moved to the United States when I was three years old. And so I really grew up in the United States.
Gabriel: Okay, and you still speak Dutch, it sounds like.
Mike: I still speak Dutch. My relatives tell me I have a horrible American accent. And sometimes I’ll put the words in an order, they’ll say, “We know what you’re saying, but we wouldn’t ever have said it exactly that way.”
Gabriel: Yeah, it’s tough if you’re out of the country. But hey, nice work keeping up the language when you moved away at age three. I’m impressed by it. Where in the US did you move to? And how did you then get into more adventurous bicycling? What were the beginnings?
Mike: So I grew up in Colorado. And in Colorado, I could do a lot of hiking and camping and with the Boy Scouts who might be out once a month or those sorts of things. And as a kid, I would also bicycle, but nothing in the touring sort of area. The touring really started when I went to the university. I was in Boston area. During the school year, it would be sort of busy with classes and everything else. But in the summers, you know, you have more time and the daylights longer and those sorts of things. And if you’re a student in Boston and you don’t have a car, then a bicycle is actually a good way to get out and get into nature and get into those sorts of areas also. Probably first tour was sort of interesting was, from Boston to the tip of Cape Cod is about 130 miles. They would sell these little strip maps, the Claire Saltonstall Bikeway. Talking with some friends, said, “Hey, wouldn’t it be fun if we could bike from where we are all the way to the tip of Cape Cod and then take the ferry back?” One of the first trips was exactly that or sort of organized with some friends. I had a 10=speed bicycle that I had bought as a teenager and brought to the university. The brakes didn’t work, you know, the best, but I could sort of put my feet down and it would sort of stop. Didn’t have panniers or anything, put a backpack on my back and we started off.
Gabriel: No, not the backpack!
Mike: We actually got about 10 miles in and unfortunately the trail went down through a little park and it went around a hill and a little bit down a curve and then a slight bend. I made it down and I didn’t quite make the curve. I stopped, or my bicycle stopped, and I didn’t. I went over the top with the handlebars and landed on the flat of my back. Fortunately, I had my backpack and that broke most of the fall.
Gabriel: The backpack saved the day!
Mike: Well, I did get my back a little bit scraped up. You know, your night team, you’re invincible. I was the leader, so we figured out where to find a pharmacy and get a bandage and bandage it up and put it together, then continued on. It was a hot day, but it got us first to the bridges of Cape Cod, which has always started this nice sight to see, these tall bridges. And you think, okay, we’re only about a little over halfway, but we’re on our way. Good. We found a spot at a church where we could camp on their lawn. And then the next morning, we pretty well made it the rest of the way to Cape Cod and made our ferry trip back. That was probably the first overnight.
Gabriel: In terms of relating to other episodes, in the episode, “Commit. You’ll Figure it Out!” about the Pan-Mass Challenge, the second day of the route is exactly that road to the very end of Cape Cod, to Provincetown. And then the participants take the ferry back to Boston.
Mike: Exactly.
Gabriel: Another connection with roads you know.
Mike: What’s also nice in New England, at least compared to growing up in Colorado, is the states are smaller. So you can bike one day and you’re suddenly in Rhode Island or you’re in New Hampshire. Colorado, you bike one day and you might be in Laramie, Wyoming, and nothing bad about Laramie, Wyoming, but that’s about as far as you can get. At least I could get.
Gabriel: There’s something exciting about crossing some kind of border, a state border or something like that. It makes you feel like you’ve gotten some distance in it. In the western states, it’s brutal because you can go for miles and miles and you’re still in the same state. So I can relate to that.
Mike: Yeah. So that’s at least where I started touring. And then after graduation, I stopped really doing as much touring. It was really after that point, I’d been in a relationship that broke up. And that got me back to, well, let’s go back to what I really enjoyed doing in college also, back to touring and riding with a local club. And one week I said, I wonder if I can make it to Chicago in a week. When you’re younger, you could do these intense sorts of trips where, I was never very fast, but you can just sort of put enough hours into it. And I was able to get myself, you know, all the way from Colorado to Chicago. And from that trip, I started dreaming a little bit again to say, what about bicycling across the United States? I was fortunate to be able to look and say, well, I have a certain number of weeks of vacation and maybe take a little bit of time. And I planned essentially a six-week break. The six weeks is not really normally what I would recommend. They often say, you know, two to three months is probably better if you’re thinking in the U.S. So that was actually 1992 when I did the trip across the U.S. Nothing too eventful. It was a lot of long days in the saddle, but it was really a neat change. It was like, you know, my life is now as a bicyclist. As opposed to getting up and going to work and shopping and taking very groceries and chores, it’s like, no, you’re up and you’re going to ride and you’re going to go see new places and you’ll be outdoors and you’re going to see people and smile at them and they’ll smile back.
Gabriel: Did you go from west to east?
Mike: Yes, I went from west to east. The sort of theme had been Portland to Portland. Now I actually went to Astoria, Oregon, because that was on the coast. But then by way of Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine.
Gabriel: So you followed a northern route through Montana and the Dakotas.
Mike: Yeah, I went through Montana and the Dakotas. I had some really nice tailwinds in South Dakota. I got up one morning in Baker, Montana, and there was just this wind that was blowing, just really, really nice and strong. Sort of planned my stops or stays. I didn’t have exactly where I would stay, but in the morning I’d say, well, if I get, you know, about here, this would be a good place to stop. And if it’s a better day, I can get to here and to here. By the middle of the day, I’d already ridden 100 miles. And the tailwind had really helped a lot for that. Well, you don’t stop when you have that sort of thing. So you just sort of let it keep you going. And then pretty much I got into an area with an Indian reservation. And you have to be a little more careful of what you stop or stay. You can definitely stay in them, but you have to know what and where. So I pretty well continued. It got a little more surreal, because there was an area of road construction. And they had sort of mud on the road. And then at some point the wind died down a little bit. And there was some hills and things. But I kept going all the way until pretty well got dark. That ended up being the longest touring day I’d ever done. It was like 207 miles. It’s not something that I would have otherwise been able to do. But the wind had really sort of just helped me that particular day.
Gabriel: This is so hilarious. I think we’re going to connect with at this rate 10 episodes. Because in the episode “Get Out of Your Comfort Zone” with Christopher Briscoe, he says the longest day he ever did was right in that same area. And I was so curious to see… I think he did 190 miles, if I remember right, and I thought, is Mike going to beat Christopher Briscoe? And you did. 207 miles. This is insane. I can’t imagine the feeling of just flying through there.
Mike: So that was just wonderful. I think I crossed South Dakota in three days. As a whole, that trip went fairly well, not too eventful. Probably the biggest issue I had was tires. I was losing tires through blowing off the rim or from flats or those sorts of things. But otherwise, I got myself pretty well across. Later that year, was one of the events that got me into this rhythm of taking a long break every so years. And the event that happened there was actually not in cycling. It was at work. November 6th at 2.30 p.m., we had a mandatory meeting from work. And they brought everybody in from our group. We got together in the group and there were people in the back of the room, and they had these little buttons that said, “employee assistance program.” And they were all these high-level managers. Like, oh oh, this isn’t good. The organization I was part of had one organization in California, one in Massachusetts and one in Colorado. And they were reorganizing. And essentially what happened was that they announced, we’re going to chop the organization that was in Colorado. Don’t worry, there’s a bunch of other positions in this site in Colorado, or you may be able to get to the other sites. But it’s certainly a shock. And it was a shock to me because I certainly enjoyed touring, but I also built a lot of myself out about being an engineer working for that particular group. And that was even part of my identity, and suddenly it wasn’t there. I actually did end up relocating. And so I ended up moving to Massachusetts as part of that. And so the thing I tended to think about was, you can take my job, but you can’t take away the fact that I was able to do that trip. If the company can do this, I can do it too.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Mike: I put what I call sort of a mark on the wall and I said, “In five years, I’m going to figure out and do another trip like this.” I don’t know what and where, but I’m going to sort of mark that point and see if I can take another trip again and take that break because that was really a wonderful thing to have done. And as that time got closer, I started talking with my manager. So what we worked out was that I would rotate to the lab that was in California. And I could take three months off and take it as a bicycle trip. Okay. Well, where do you go? And I started looking out and I thought, well, maybe I can go down the Alaska highway. Then I started thinking I can probably even keep going from the Alaska highway and keep going east and see how far across Canada I can go. That’s really how the second long trip started. And it pretty well started five years after the first long trip. So that’s really what led into that second trip that came across Canada. I started in Fairbanks, Alaska. I came down the Alaska Highway. I’d figured out my tire problems and issues. I didn’t have those, but I ended up having rim issues. I’m a little bit heavy and I broke three rims on the trip across Canada.
Gabriel: Wow.
Mike: What I diagnosed later is I probably needed, you know, more spokes and a beefier wheel. That was sort of the biggest challenge or issue I had with that. The first of those actually happened on the Alaska Highway. I was coming down near Laird River. You could already tell the rim was going to fall apart, but you continue as long as you can. And then at some point it did fall apart. And then it’s like, okay, well, let’s just start walking. And I walked for a few kilometers and met a pickup came by and brought me to the area where there’s a campground and hot springs and all that. In that timing, and the internet has really changed things, what I did is I looked up in the Yellow Pages and I found the bike shop that was a few hundred kilometers away. And I called them up and I said, you know, “I’m here. I’m in the Alaska Highway. I’ve lost my rim. Can you build a wheel?” And, “Yeah, we can probably do this and send it up and all of that.” By phone and arranging remotely, arranged to have a wheel sent out. And that took me, you know, five or six days. Then I went pretty well across the prairies all the way out and ended up in Newfoundland, a little over 6,000 miles total. That brought me into the third of those labs. So I started in the Colorado lab and then l’d been in the Massachusetts lab and I was in the California lab. I was sort of excited initially about California as a place to be temporarily. And it was during the dot com era. I was in software. It was an exciting and interesting place, but it also wasn’t necessarily where I wanted to be long term.
Gabriel: When you say California, you mean Silicon Valley specifically?
Mike: Silicon Valley, San José. That had me thinking again, okay, just like I was able to take that second long trip, I wonder if I can figure out over time, you know, what I might be able to do to take another long trip. What I sort of encountered was within our company, and I was working for a large company, we had a set of HR policies and they talk about different types of leave. There was a leave that was listed called personal leave. The policy says the longest leave you can grant is a year. So I said, well, it’s easier to ask for a longer period and make it shorter than to ask for a shorter period and make it longer. So I said, “Well, what if I took a year?” And I sort of dubbed it One Year by Bicycle. And then you get to dream about, okay, if I had a year, where would I go and what would I do? As events happened, National Geographic had a series by a person named Roff Smith, and it was a three part series. He took a bicycle ride around Australia. He later wrote a book called Cold Beer and Crocodiles, with the classic sort of really nice photos and everything that. Wow, that’s really interesting and exciting to have done that sort of trip all the way around Australia. That’s really a little bit where the idea for the third long trip sort of came from. I broke that into a few different pieces. I broke it into, well, let’s take the first two months and let’s bicycle across the US again as sort of the startup. And then I flew to Sydney, Australia, and I had eight months to go one time counterclockwise around the outside of Australia. And then after that, I had some time in New Zealand and some time in India.
Gabriel: And what are some of the memorable moments from your year on the bicycle?
Mike: So one of the things I really liked about it, particularly in the north of Australia, there’s mostly one road, at least one sealed road. There’s a bunch of spots to pull off into camp. And I actually had a guide that was a caravaner’s guide, which was just sort of a pamphlet. It says you could stop here, you could stop here. And so I was stopping in those places. And just like in the US, we have snowbirds that may start in the northern states and end up in Florida or Arizona. And I’m sure in Europe, you get people in the south of Spain or other places. In Australia, you also have the similar phenomena. There’s also people that will take a caravan and they will go across the north of Australia for the whole winter and go place to place. And so I was meeting many of these people because we were on the same road, that was the one paved road. And then we would stop and then we’d be camped with somebody. Maybe I would continue on the bike and then a day or two later, they would pass me again. And so it was sort of an interesting sort of group and social sort of thing of meeting these different people. There was what we would call sort of the Bush Telegraph, where they could tell me about, “Oh yeah, we saw these other cyclists” and said, “well, were these the people with the big hats or the people with the trailer?” Australia I think is interesting in that probably more than most countries, a large proportion of the population lives in or close to just a few of the capital cities or the main areas. But where I was was exactly the places that weren’t that most of the time. It was all the Outback areas.
Gabriel: And this is still before social media. So I think that’s one of the really cool things that I’m fond of from my touring time, which is exactly that concept, that you have a bunch of people going in the same general direction and you might lose touch for a few days, but then you see them again and you reconnect. And this is all done just by chance, which nowadays it’s not really like that anymore, because people are constantly on their phones and you know, “Where are you?” “I’m here.”
Mike: Instagram and different things, yeah.
Gabriel: That whole thing has been lost. And I’m actually glad that I got to experience it. And so did you. It’s really fun. You get so excited to see the same people after four days like, “Hey, it’s the big hat people!” So that’s wonderful.
Mike: Probably of some of the longer tours, that’s certainly one that I enjoyed quite a bit.
Gabriel: You went around Australia, that’s huge. And then you casually mentioned New Zealand and India. I mean, those are also big adventures. There must be some memories from those countries.
Mike: So they were actually a little bit different in different ways. So New Zealand, I went up and down the North Island, and maybe I get back to Australia. I almost had a little bit of Australia withdrawal symptom because I had spent so much time, got so used to Australia that I was in New Zealand and I was thinking, this isn’t Australia.
Gabriel: But they’re very close friends, New Zealand and Australia.
Mike: But they’re a little different in the sense that it’s shorter in distance, it’s hillier, it’s different sorts of areas.
Gabriel: Right. The topography is different in New Zealand.
Mike: There’s also a huge variety in New Zealand in a short amount of time. From the big city to the volcanic areas to some of the rainforests in the north. That was actually where I had progressed from tire troubles to rim sorts of things. I had some hub troubles. Snd my hub started to spin both ways. Oh, so the little pawls sort of stuck open and they completely stayed open. And I brought it into a bike shop and they took it apart and thought I had it fixed, but it ended up not quite being fixed. A few days later, I was cycling along and going on a little hilly area near a place called Napier. I think it’s a fruit growing region, among other things in New Zealand. Suddenly, if I pedaled, there was no, you know, it didn’t grab, the pawls were stuck open.
Gabriel: This is the mechanism that allows you to freewheel?
Mike: Yeah, so it allows you to freewheel one way and that grabs the other way.
Gabriel: Right.
Mike: There’s supposed to come down and grab and then when you go the other way, there’s supposed to be open and freewheel and they stayed open and didn’t grab.
Gabriel: When you hear that click, click, click, click, click, click, when you’re freewheeling, that’s the pawls doing their job.
Mike: Exactly.
Gabriel: But then if they’re not grabbing, then when you pedal, nothing’s happening. Uh oh. Okay, how did you solve that problem?
Mike: I walked along the road and there were some people from the fruit area that had taken their load of fruit in the van to the capital of Auckland and they were returning with an empty van and they see me walking the bicycle along the road and so they gave me a ride to Napier. In Napier, I found a bike shop. We’d already tried in a previous city where it was starting to have some troubles to open the hub up and get that cleaned out and that hadn’t worked. So we just ended up having a whole new wheel built and sent up when I was in Napier. The tail end of that trip was in India. India is just intense. It was the right way to finish a year-long trip in that you just don’t have time to stop and think, and it’s sort of the opposite of what Australia had beenm of being relaxing and just out of the Outback and camping. It was like sights and sounds and smells and you’re on the road and there’s little of everything and everything makes noise. The little things have bells on them and the medium-sized things have toots and then the big ones have really large honks and everything’s going. I went down around to the southern tip, and you had a guest on that talked about building up the west side of India which I also went up.
Gabriel: Claus Andersen, “The Biking Viking,” he went along the coast.
Mike: And then he went up the West Coast and that’s also the West Coast that I went up.
Gabriel: That’s the same West Coast. Right, that’s the Kerala state.
Mike: Yeah.
Gabriel: He loved that. He said that that was amazing. He highly recommended it.
Mike: It was a nice area. I went inland at a place called Kozhikode. He went I think even further up. That had actually been a tough day for me because it was hot and I had needed a little bit of extra water and the water I got was actually seltzer and carbonated. That didn’t work so well and I suddenly had a bunch of cramps and I got into the city and I suddenly threw up a little bit. When something like that happens in India, the hypercondriac in you can come out. You read the little guidebook and you think all of all the horrible things, what could this possibly be? Fortunately enough, it turned out that it fixed itself up quick enough that it really wasn’t that big of a deal but you don’t know that at the time coming in. I had been working with actually a team in Bangalore and so I met in with the team. They were very hospitable. Before, I had actually traveled in India on business and when I traveled in India on business, they’d been a little bit almost too careful. They’d been, you know, “Well, you have to stay in a fancy hotel and you have to do this and that because we don’t want our guests to get sick and we want to be careful,” and all those sorts of things. But if you show up as someone who’s been bicycling around India, then you’ve probably gone and seen things in ways that some of them may not even have.
Gabriel: True.
Mike: A number of years later, I actually worked in India for a little bit because I had a team there and I went cycling with actually a group of Indian techies in Bangalore who had an organized group and we went on a weekend and hired a bus and hired a truck to carry all our bikes. I think I was the only one that wasn’t from India, but 40 or 50 of us were cycling through Kerala.
Gabriel: Yeah, and for those who aren’t aware, Bangalore is sort of the equivalent of Silicon Valley, I guess. It’s a tech hub of India.
Mike: Definitely, yeah.
Gabriel: Fun that there should be these organized groups also in India. Why not? And was everybody on nice road bikes or on a mix of bikes?
Mike: There were generally pretty nice bikes and what was interesting also was at least amongst the engineer culture, a few of them at least wanted to be careful to point out that they were riding bikes because they could, not because they had to. Amongst a few of them, there was almost a little bit of a status of, “Look at the fancy bike that I have and all the gear and all the equipment and all the things I have with it.”
Gabriel: Well, that’s no different than riding your bike in Silicon Valley.
Mike: Probably also true, yeah. And in India, I had what I called sort of my three luxuries when I was thinking about a place to stay. One of them was hot water. The second luxury was a Western-style toilet and the third luxury was air conditioning. Not so much because of the cold but because it meant that the windows would be sealed and therefore I wouldn’t worry as much about insects and those sorts of things coming in. I stayed in some places that had three luxuries and I stayed in places that had no luxuries. It was just a little of everything. That was probably the thing that struck me the most in India is it was just such a huge variety, new and modern and old and I passed by a whole row of people digging ditches for a fiberoptic cable. You know, the whole juxtaposition of so much variety and so much difference.
Gabriel: Yeah, it’s a real clash of traditional values with technological advancement. That brings up an interesting point though. In Australia, I got the impression you were camping, because you had mentioned having that guide that told you maybe where you could camp but when you talk about the luxuries that’s something you would get from a hostel or…
Mike: I think you can camp in India but in South India didn’t make as much sense. So when I was in New Zealand, I mailed home my tent and mailed home my sleeping bag and there were two reasons why I did that. One was that the wheel that I had built to replace the bad hub wasn’t as sturdy a wheel as the wheel I had started with. So I thought, okay, I need to be careful because otherwise I’ll start breaking spokes again. And the second was that in India, particularly in the south, I knew that I would be close enough to find some place where I could stay. That’s the other thing that’s sort of fun and cycle touring. You would stay in places that you otherwise wouldn’t normally stay in. Again, this variety came in. There were some towns that were really touristy towns and you would walk on the streets and people would look at you as a tourist and there were other places where they were religious and temple towns and there were no Western tourists. So they would look at you like, you’re just different. But nobody would come and bother you and think let’s interact with them as a tourist. People were very polite, but they were also pretty curious. And so at one point, for example, I stopped to patch a tire. I look up and there are 16 people in an infant watching me. Very polite just standing there and watching me fix my tire. It goes a little bit both ways as a cycle tourist. You get to see how people live and you’re close enough amongst it that you can smile at people. You can see them smile back at you. You have this natural look of, okay, you’re out there. People can see that you’re spending energy and you also get a little bit, probably a different glimpse. But you get a glimpse of how people are living and what their lives are like.
Gabriel: Yeah, definitely. And sometimes you see the attractions and sometimes you become the attraction.
Mike: Well, a little bit of both on this.
Gabriel: It sounds like it was a really successful year.
Mike: Absolutely. That was the longest trip and I really felt like, okay, I’m sure I’m glad I was able to do that. And by now I have the pattern set. And I said, okay, another five years or so, I’m going to look out and I’m going to figure out what the next one is. And when I get closer, I’m going to go do that. As opposed to National Geographic, what inspired the next trip was, it was 2004. Vladimir Putin was running for his first reelection as president. And there was a photo that made the Russian media but also the world media of a bunch of Russians in big hats in the winter and they were having a ribbon-cutting ceremony. And they were cutting a ribbon because they were opening a road across Russia. That was certainly a big point of national pride. But the way I looked at it was, wow, if there’s a road across Russia, that means with one visa and one language, I can get across Asia. That would be an interesting place to go do another ride. That was in community college and I signed up for some Russian classes to get started. And I started sort of preparing and planning and figuring out over time. After the Australia trip, I moved back to Colorado. And again, I looked and I said, okay, well, let’s see if I can do another leave of absence and see if I can do that as a trip across Russia.
Gabriel: So being able to do this leave, and it sounds like you did it multiple times, was just amazing.
Mike: In total, I did four leaves with two different companies.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Mike: In the Russia case, I took a few years and I got ready and then I pretty well did that trip. That ended up being 10 months long. I took a month to sort of get prepped up in Texas. And then I flew to Amsterdam and I went from Amsterdam to St. Petersburg. I took another few weeks of Russian class there and then I cycled across. Probably one of the things that was different in that trip was, you know, the previous trips had been predominantly or pretty well English speaking places. I had enough Russian that it was beyond the survival Russian, but I wasn’t really the extremely conversational part. One of the things I thought of doing this is, okay, should I do this maybe with somebody else also or see if there’s other people that we might do this with? There was a “companions wanted” thing in Adventure Cycling. And I posted something there and I said, I’m planning on a ride from Amsterdam to Vladivostok. Anybody interested in all their part of this?
Gabriel: There’s a further connection because in the episode “Big Hairy Audacious Goal” with Alan Gilbert, he finds his riding companion to go across the United States on Adventure Cycling’s “companions wanted” site. So that’s another instance of that since we’re bringing in so many references.
Mike: Absolutely. I got maybe 15 responses and four or five of them were more serious. Of the four or five, there was one that came towards the end and was particularly strong coming in. And that was a woman named Miki who was in Amsterdam. Then you do the initial conversations of let’s get on the phone. Let’s figure out what this might mean. We’re otherwise complete strangers. She’d actually done quite a bit of bicycle touring in South America. She’d been across Africa. She’d done quite a bit with a partner and she wasn’t with that partner anymore and was looking also for an opportunity for this. There were two other things that she didn’t tell me right away because she was concerned that that might cause me not to want to ride with her. One was that she had had cancer and it had gone into remission. And in the time that she’d had that, she’d thought, you know, I really want to get a chance to go ride across to Vladivostok. And so here was this person saying, I’m going to do this ride to Vladivostok. And it happened to match. The other thing that she would have been careful of not saying – all this came out in the trip a little bit as we went along – was that she was 62 years old. What she had told me at one point is that she had been on the original Bikecentennial, bicycling across America.
Gabriel: Oh, wow.
Mike: I should have done the math to say, if you’re old enough to Bikecentennial, how old are you?
Gabriel: Right. 1976, Bikecentennial.
Mike: As the trip started, we just sort of learned, oh, okay. And those things wouldn’t have mattered, but she was concerned that you have those sorts of comments to some of you don’t know, then maybe you don’t end up biking together.
Gabriel: Yeah, I can see her caution with that.
Mike: We started out and we essentially figured out, we sometimes had different styles, and we had to figure out how to make that work. Probably one of the larger things was she was a faster cyclist than I was. And particularly if you’re going to spend five, six months cycling together, you don’t necessarily plan on spending the whole day with one person who feels like they’re going too fast and one who’s going too slow. And so we worked out sort of a pattern where I would start out earlier in the morning. She would just take her time at camp and then basically pass me partway along the morning. And then she would find some spot that we might meet for lunch. And then we would continue to the end of the day. And then towards the end of the day, we would do what we called sort of our water ritual, which is we would go to some village or other place and we would find where are they getting their water from. And we would show up and sometimes had a pump pile. Sometimes they would take our water bag and they would go into their house and come back with water. But we figured as long as we were drinking water that they were drinking, it couldn’t be too bad. And then we would go maybe another 10 kilometers and we find some place beside the road and camp.
Gabriel: What you figured out is a really great way of dealing with two people who tour at different speeds. It’s a very common issue. Starting out one before the other one and having certain rituals associated with it, that’s how it can be made a positive experience for both riders, despite the speed difference. It’s really cool that you work that out, I guess, on the road. You didn’t talk about this in advance.
Mike: That’s not something you immediately talk about.
Gabriel: No.
Mike: And we also found at least one pitfall that wouldn’t happen today because people would have cell phones and be able to text. But we didn’t have phones with us. There was one point at which we lost each other for 11 days.
Gabriel: For 11 days? I thought you were going to say 11 hours.
Mike: No, no. It would turn out to be 11 days.
Gabriel: Wow.
Mike: That came in Kazan, which is, I think, on the Volga River. It’s where the czars were at least buried and they had tombs for them. Part of our normal pattern would be that we would stay in a city for, you know, one or two days. We would get our washing done, we would check the internet, and then we would be going from there to the next city. And we might be, depending on how better that next city would be, six to ten days and we’d be camping every night. And so as we left Kazan, I had mentioned to her that I wasn’t feeling 100%. And so as we started out, we tried to sort of start together. And she got a little ways ahead of me and then would wait. But the problem that happened was that she stopped somewhere to wait for me and I passed her and neither of us saw each other. So now we were in this situation where I was ahead thinking she’s ahead of me. It’s warm. I better keep going so that I don’t hold her up because it’s going to be in the high 30s Celsius or almost close to 40. I need to keep going. And she was thinking, he was feeling sick. He’s behind me still. What happened was she turned around and said, “I will just go back to where we stayed that day.” I went and I continued on, essentially about 100 kilometers. And then I decided I was going to camp somewhere where I could just keep watching the road. So that first day, what happened was I was 100 kilometers away from Kazan and she was back in Kazan. And the internet in Russia at that point, you could go to post offices and things, you’d get into the internet. But we were going in from there to cross the Urals and it was getting more sparse from there. And so the next day I left and I went to – there was a spot there was going to be a water crossing with fairies four times a day – I think I’ll at least go there and I’ll see if she’s there. And then at some point it’s like, okay, well, I don’t know what happened. I’m ahead. She was behind. I will see if I can over the next few days get to a spot where I can get to the internet and then I’ll send a note and we’ll sort of see what happened.
Gabriel: Had you decided what road you would follow?
Mike: We hadn’t 100% decided what route we were going to take across the Urals. It turned out that every time I tried to find an internet, there were kids there that were online and playing and they were using the terminals at the post office and I wasn’t patient enough to wait. So pretty well continued all the way to Yekaterinburg. It’s a large city of, you know, more than a million people. And it was like, okay, I don’t know what happened. I’ll do my city ritual. I’ll come into the large hotel and I will then go find an internet cafe and I’ll just put out a note. She knew she was behind and she had also gone down the wrong road one day. So she ended up essentially coming into Yekaterinburg one day after I had, and it turned out by happenstance she picked the same hotel that was the hotel I was staying at. She leaned her bicycle against the wall there and I was walking around and I see her bike and it’s like, oh, wow. So then we were able to connect again.
Gabriel: Yeah, like we were talking about the amazing part about seeing someone again. I can only imagine when after all of this looking, you see her bike against the wall. That is cool.
Mike: There were probably half a dozen hotels that would have naturally been choices to make. We ended up picking the same one.
Gabriel: Yeah. How did it work out with Miki in the end? You got to Vladivostok. Was it an emotional moment for her? She really wanted to do this.
Mike: Yeah, it was definitely for both of us. It was sort of a mixture of different things. It was, hey, we’ve gotten this done. We actually had a, “It’s tough to say goodbye.” The other thing that I think also weighed on her a little bit had been that she’d also wanted to get back among other things to get medical things checked out. And in particular, we had a little bit of a caution relative to rabies. So what had happened was before the trip, we’d had some conversation about should we get rabies shops or not. And generally, the guidance of that has changed a little bit over time. But at the time, the travel clinic guidance had been that generally, rabies is a pretty serious thing. And if you get it, you need a sequence of five shots. And you can get three of those shots in advance. But it was also expensive and we talked about, should we do that or should we not do that? And we sort of both decided that, well, if we’re going to have to get five shots anyway, let’s just do it a miss. But I told you that we would do our water ritual at the end of the day. In Siberia, we had a spot where there was a bridge crossing and we walked down the bridge to the spot where the guards had their little area. And they were able, they said, we can get you a little bit of water for your drinking and you’ll get the other water from the river. There was a guard dog there and the guard dog followed us and it bit Miki on the back of the knee. And we didn’t do a huge amount more. They put a bandage on it and we cycled our 10 kilometers, and we were there at the end of the day. Overnight, she started thinking a little bit about, gee, I’m a little concerned about having been bitten. I want to go back and see that dog.
Gabriel: “Bitten and Back,” you might say.
Mike: Yes. So we actually cycled back to there. And the dog was now tied up and was barking like everything and excited and all this stuff. So it’s like, okay, looks like the dog is at least healthy. But what that also meant is when she finished, she also wanted to go back. And in the Netherlands, they did end up with the more of the sequence of the shots after that point also. For her, it was a completion of the trip. For me, it was a pause until I could go to the China portion of the trip. And I will tell you what the connection I can make with Tour d’Afrique. The connection with Henry Gold.
Gabriel: Wow!
Mike: It turned out, and Henry told you that the first trip they did across the Silk Route was in 2007. That was from Istanbul to Beijing. I had decided that the biggest goal in my 10 months was going to be that I wanted to get across Europe and Asia, and across Russia. But I wasn’t 100% sure. Would there be some barrier or some issue that I ran into? So a little bit as a backup, I said, you know, what I’ll do is I will sign up for the last two months of Tour d’Afrique’s trip from Istanbul to Beijing in the western parts of China. I signed up for their trip, but just as what they call a sectional rider, where you just ride for part of that trip. Now as it turned out, it all worked out in the timing. And so after the Russia portion of that 10 months, I flew to Ürümqi in western China. And I basically vectored from there and met up with the Tour d’Afriequ group that had come from Istanbul. I had spent several months just bicycling with one other person, and now I was part of a supported ride of 35 people. It was just a different type of style of riding.
Gabriel: And was Henry Gold on this tour?
Mike: Henry Gold was on that tour.
Gabriel: Amazing.
Mike: Because it was the first ride that he was doing with that.
Gabriel: And he likes to do the first ride of each tour.
Mike: Yeah, I joined them for the tail end of that particular ride.
Gabriel: I didn’t even know that this sectional rider was a thing on the TDA tours. I thought you were in for all or nothing. Yeah, how did that go? It must have been a big change, like you said, from one companion to 30.
Mike: There are a few different things. One is it’s actually a little bit of an adjustment of styles from one ride to the other. So if you’re on your own trip, you’re captain of your own little boat. You deal with getting your food and finding out where you’re going and where you stop and all those sorts of things. If you’re part of a larger tour, many of these things are now done for you. You don’t end up needing to go find and get the food and you don’t really determine the route. Your choice is either that you’re on the route or you’re on the support vehicle, because there’s just sort of a schedule that you’re going to proceed with. I mean, in general, I was reasonably impressed with TDA as an organization and how they put that together and how they did the different groups and organization and all of that. There was also a little bit of a difference in that as a sectional rider, you came in to a group that had already worked itself out in terms of how people related to each other and where the groups were and you came in as just sort of the stranger in the middle of that.
Gabriel: Yeah, that’s a good point. The social aspect of it.
Mike: That trip had actually been tough for some people, I think, earlier on.
Gabriel: I can imagine.
Mike: So that was the inaugural one, is in 2007. In November 2007, pretty well a few days after we showed up in Beijing, I went to TDA’s website and I signed up for Africa. You could put a year in and I put 2013. And they came back to me and they said, “You know, did you mean 2010? Or?” I said, “No, this was sort of my mark on the wall.” And the reason why I would make a trade-off between doing that, say Africa by myself versus a trip like this is, just like Russia has the language, I liked having this organized trip where there would be Chinese. Or in Africa there’s even more languages or even more things. So it gave me a little bit of a comfort zone to help deal with language and visas and borders and all of those sorts of things with 10 countries across the way. And Henry pointed out, each year the political situations are different in some of the countries. But the year I was there, we were fortunate to mostly be able to get across all 10 countries. Particularly north of the equator is a little bit tougher almost even than south of the equator. Just in terms of the Sahara desert, in terms of Ethiopia is just its own special sort of rock-throwing in just different areas. In Egypt, he talked about having government support vehicles and minders and all those sorts of things. Sudan was also tough. The fall before we had gone, they had burned the German embassy, protesters had. Turned out perfectly fine. And Sudan is probably one of the nicest people. But that was definitely a good spot to have gone in a supported ride.
Gabriel: Well, cool that you got to do the whole Cairo to Cape Town.
Mike: The year that we were there, while there were one or two big challenges politically, the biggest caution had been that Kenya was having national elections. So here we were, we were going to be bicycling across the north of Kenya. On March 4th was going to be their election day. And we were going to be there with a whole set of bicyclists, you know, right at that time. And it turned out with a bit of abundance of caution, they said, particularly in the north, if there’s unrest, that’s not a good spot to have 50 cyclists. The trip got modified a little bit to say what we’ll do is we’ll take two days and we will bus you to one of the towns that’s close to Nairobi and that happens to also have, I think, an army base and an Air Force base. One of them was British and the other was Kenyan. And we waited out the day of the election. And the idea had been if there had really been unrest, they could put everybody in buses and get us across the border to Tanzania quick enough. There was a lot of excitement and enthusiasm, but it turned out to be pretty well peaceful.
Gabriel: Makes you realize how incredible it is to run such an organization and the things you need to take into account, from individual riders to unrest in the country.
Mike: One of the challenges I actually had is because it’s sort of a fixed route, and I tend to be a slower cyclist, in Sudan, I got to the spot where it was February, but it was a warm enough day, and my cycle computer later reported the high temperature of 47 Celsius. And I started walking for a little bit. And at some point, one of the sport dickles came by. They picked me up. That had been the first point I’d gotten on a support vehicle. I’d been drinking a lot of water, but a bunch of it sort of threw up from this. And then I got into camp and actually ended up with an IV for a little bit to get liquid back in me. And that was enough of a caution to say, you know, I need to be careful. And maybe the next day I’ll just take a day on the vehicle. It also sort of underscored me a little of the difference, which is a trip like this enabled me to do that. As a slower rider, I might have done different alternatives if I was on my own. The other phenomena that has happened a little on the TDA trips is, you tend to have a whole set of Type A personalities. I’m going to go out, I’m going to do all these things. There was something known a little bit as EFI, every fine inch, or F gets replaced with a swear word.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Mike: And there’s a little bit of a notion where you’re there to ride. And that was the first point at which physically my body couldn’t ride that last little bit. And I actually had a phenomenon a little later in Malawi, where I had gotten an infection in my leg. And my right leg was twice as big as my left leg and I couldn’t walk very well.
Gabriel: Oh, geez.
Mike: That wasn’t good. We ended up getting some antibiotics, but I also ended up not being able to ride for a few days after that also.
Gabriel: An infection from what?
Mike: I don’t know what exact infection, but it was, I had cut on the back of my leg. I think my pedals had scraped up or something like that. And then we went in areas of Tanzania first, that was very much off-road in mud and gravel and all those sorts of areas. And so I’d had it sort of bandaged up and something had gotten in there and gotten infected.
Gabriel: So there again, though, it seemed like having the support vehicle was helpful.
Mike: That was absolutely important, right? And one of the other riders was also actually a surgeon in Switzerland. And she happened to also point this out, and then actually the TDA medic also helped me get some local antibiotics in the capital of Malawi. With that, it fortunately got taken care of in a few days.
Gabriel: When you mentioned that the other rider was a doctor, it must be an incredible array of people that you meet from all walks of life and all countries that are suddenly thrown together into this tour.
Mike: It was fun. People were there because we wanted to be there. We wanted to be out. We wanted to be riding. We were having fun. We were exploring Africa. And there was also a bit of a mindset. There was a saying amongst the group – maybe it’s all the groups – but, “This is Africa.” There’d be something that would happen. Be unexpected, and it’s like, “Okay, well, this is Africa.” That’s just the way these things work. So it was a pretty upbeat group.
Gabriel: So that was 2013. Tour d’Afrique. When did you switch jobs?
Mike: Yeah, so I switched jobs in 2009 and I had the reservation in 2013. So now with the new company, I also looked up the leave policies. The personal leave absence, I could take six months.
Gabriel: Okay. And the TDA trip across Africa, it’s four months, right?
Mike: It’s four months. And I took the remaining two months and I was just going to bicycle by myself, from Oregon to Colorado. And so it was sort of an epilogue, which is Africa is intense and with this whole group and everything else. And my way of decompressing from my cycling vacation was to take a cycling vacation. But to do it by myself across the Western US, in areas that I was familiar with.
Gabriel: Got it.
Mike: The trip that I took after the TDA trip in gotten all the continents except for South America.
Gabriel: Right.
Mike: And I said, I’d really like to do South America. You start looking and dreaming and say, well, the classic thing to do is to go across both Americas and to start in Prudhoe Bay and end up in Ushuaia. Fast people may be able to do it in nine months, but more classically, a year and a half makes sense. The seasons come into play and you start in the summer in the northern hemisphere and you end up in the summer in the southern hemisphere. Now my scheme of taking a leave of absence in half a year doesn’t quite work. That’s the instance where what I decided to do was the other way people would do this is you quit. And I quit…
Gabriel: Yeah,
Mike: With keeping in touch with my boss and company and saying, you know, my intention is really to stop. And when I finished this year and a half, don’t be surprised if you see me back with my resume. I started in Prudhoe Bay. I went down the Alaska Highway. I took the Cassiar Highway and then I went to Banff. And the idea was that I wanted to try part of the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route.
Gabriel: Oh, okay.
Mike: As I tried parts of that, I realized I was having at least as much fun not being in the gravel parts as just being on the paved areas that were close to the gravel parts. So I went sort of down the Rockies, all the way down to New Mexico and then I went across to San Diego and then I went from San Diego down the Baja Peninsula.
Gabriel: So wait, did you go all the way down Baja to La Paz and then over with a boat?
Mike: Yes. So, from La Paz, I took a ferry to Mazatlan and then from Mazatlan, I pretty well went south of Mexico City to Oaxaca. I also happened to do a different person I met on the internet.
Gabriel: The person you met on the internet, was that Adventure Cycling again?
Mike: There was a bikeforums.net cycle touring forum. I think I posted in the forums that I was doing this trip and they reached out to me and said, “Hey, by the way, you know, are you interested in having me also join you?” We essentially set up and we had the remote conversations and we said, actually, this could sort of work. Took a week in Oaxaca just to wait so that you’d be ready. And I went to a language school just for a week there.
Gabriel: Okay.
Mike: We basically cycled from southern Mexico into Costa Rica together and that actually worked quite well. Our cycling styles were probably a little closer matched. We sort of worked out how that best worked with both of us.
Gabriel: This time you had phones, at least.
Mike: We had phones, yeah. We wouldn’t get lost by getting separated from each other.
Gabriel: Cool. And how did you cross the Darién Gap, which is something that has come up in previous episodes?
Mike: The short answer is that I flew across the Darién Gap.
Gabriel: Nice.
Mike: Because I was flying anyway, I used that as an occasion to fly back from Panama City, back to the US. And once I was in the US, I did my taxes and I got other things all done. And I flew back to Cartagena and then I continued the trip from there.
Gabriel: All right. So that is the longest ever crossing of the Gap, as you did it via the United States.
Mike: Yeah. So you do it back via the US.
Gabriel: Okay. That’s one way to do it. And then, yeah, Cartagena is the traditional starting point at the very top of South America. And I assume you went the usual way. Ecuador, Peru…
Mike: There are a few choices you could make. In Peru, I largely stayed on the coast, even in the northern part. People will sometimes come through the mountains there. I was on the coast in northern Peru. And then past Lima, I stayed on the coast and I went up to Arequipa. So the other place sometimes people will go is they will go to Cusco and Machu Picchu and all that. I came up a little bit later. I came up to Arequipa and then I went to Lake Titicaca and then to Bolivia and the salt flats. And then I came across there into Argentina down to Salta and then all the way south to Bariloche. And in Bariloche, I had some time again before I was going to meet the TDA group in Puerto Montt.
Gabriel: Oh, okay.
Mike: And I did the Carretera Austral and Patagonia with TDA as a sectional rider. And so this had been the third trip that I took with TDA. And the reason I did that is I told you the first one I took with them was in China because the language and finishing the Silk Route. And Africa I did because it’s Africa. And Patagonia I could have done, but it’s also a little bit more challenging with the distances and with the climate.
Gabriel: Puerto Montt is the start of the Carretera Austral, which has been featured on multiple episodes. And you did that with TDA. I mean, sorry, Mike, I just have to think when I hear everything you did on your own, you definitely could have kept going from Puerto Montt on Ushuaia on your own.
Mike: I could have.
Gabriel: But you decided to do the group thing.
Mike: Yeah, it’s an interesting variety and you do little bits in different ways.
Gabriel: That’s an excellent point. People often ask, well, what’s the best way to tour? And there is no best way, of course. But I find it cool that you’ve kind of worked this in. So at times you were solo, at times you found someone, maybe at times you rode with someone you just met coincidentally and you maybe rode for a day or two.
Mike: Yeah.
Gabriel: And then you finished with the supported ride. So that does kind of keep it fresh, because a year and a half is a really long time to be on the road.
Mike: We definitely had a crew of cyclists that we were riding together in Ruta 40, Basically between Salta and Mendoza, there were four or five of us and we would leapfrog and we rode together and we’d stay in some of the same towns.
Gabriel: Right. That situation again. Cool. Wow. What an adventure. And have we said what years these were? No, we haven’t.
Mike: I started North America on the solstice in 2016 and I finished in the summer solstice in 2017, in December.
Gabriel: And then you went back, got a job at the same company.
Mike: I ended up at the same company. It took me a few months more than I expected.
Gabriel: I know you did some smaller tours in the US.
Mike: I’ve done quite a few smaller ones also. The only remaining larger one was also six months. And you had a guest at one point that went to visit all the capitals or something in Germany using the traveling salesman problem or something.
Gabriel: Oh, all the Neukirchen, the New Churches.
Mike: Yes.
Gabriel: Oh, wow. That’s going way back. That’s episode two.
Mike: I did essentially a variation. I again went and said, I want to take six months off. Where can I take it as a leap of absence? And I had some reasons why I sort of needed to be a little closer in the US. And I said, well, okay, what would I dream if I did? If you’re a computer person, you can work out the traveling salesman problem and say, well, okay, there’s 48 state capitals in the US. I wonder what the shortest route is to find them? And I worked out a route and I said, okay, I probably can’t do that in six months. But I can use that as a way to go visit state capitals. I started in the US capital in Washington, DC, and I ended up in Olympia, Washington, and then Seattle, Washington, 6,600 miles later, over six months. I did learn two things that are useful adjustments if you do the traveling salesman, if you’re doing it on the bicycle. One I figured out in advance and one I didn’t. One is it’s not just distance. You want to look at the weather. So you don’t want to be in the South in the summer and the North in the winter. So you have to pick a route and you have to adjust it to also make that. The other thing you need to do, and I hadn’t worked this out in advance, was that there can be some real differences in how hilly the gaps are between the different capitals. And I learned this as I was coming across Connecticut and there was all these little hills and I was thinking, oh, gee, my traveling salesman route has me going across the Appalachians between Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and Charleston, West Virginia. And that is just the hilliest sort of area. So I did relax my assumptions a little bit and said, okay, well, I need to find a way to change the algorithm, so that I also take into account the routing that might work better for a cyclist and not just pick an algorithm that only picks the shortest route.
Gabriel: You had to assign some kind of penalty, correlated to the hilliness between those two points.
Mike: Yes, exactly. A waiter penalty.
Gabriel: Mike, this is unbelievable. I never thought the traveling salesman problem would appear on the podcast and now it has appeared for a second time. I mean, I’m speechless.
Mike: Second time, yes.
Gabriel: And that worked out. You also completed that ride.
Mike: So that one, because I wasn’t going to do all the capitals, because I knew I couldn’t do that, I just picked the ones that I could. And over six months, I stopped past 26 of the US state capitals. That conveniently leaves me, you know, another 22 I now can put on my wish list. And I can go visit in the future.
Gabriel: How do you look back on this amazing bike touring career that you’ve had? What advice would you give to other bicycle adventurers?
Mike: The way I look at it is I feel very fortunate and grateful that I’ve been able to do this combination. It wasn’t something that I set out to do, you know, upfront. But as I look over across both the work career and the cycling career, I’ve felt fortunate that I’ve been able to take, I think totaled up just in my long trips is probably close to five years of cycle touring in these long trips amongst also, you know, another 34 years of working. There’s definitely a difference between how and what I’ve been able to do when I was just out of college and racing and running across the US and maybe how I might ride now. Occasionally, I’ve noticed some people will have a sense to say, “Well, okay, I can just wait and do this touring when I retire.” That’s fine if that’s your choice. But what I like is not so much doing all the work all at once. And then at the end saying, okay, now I have the time, but suddenly there may be other reasons why you can’t tour at that point.
Gabriel: I have heard other people say, “Oh, when I retire, I’m going to do this or I’ll finally have time for it.” And it always makes me a little nervous. If you want to do something, then I think your story shows, now’s the time to do it. And if you can work out a leave of absence or some arrangement with your employer, that’s okay. That’s really amazing. But even if you can’t, you quit and something else will come up.
Mike: I feel fortunate that I’ve been able to do that in the touring so far. And I’m not certainly not done touring.
Gabriel: No, you got a bunch of US capitals to visit.
Mike: Exactly. I have the 22 capitals to go finish and from there I have a bunch of other places to go visit.
Gabriel: The transcript for this episode is available on The Accidental Bicycle Tourist website. I welcome feedback and suggestions for this and other episodes. You’ll find a link to all contact information in the show notes. If you would like to rate or review the show, you can do that on your favorite podcast platform. You can also follow the podcast on Instagram. Thank you to Anna Lindenmeier for the cover artwork and to Timothy Shortell for the original music. This podcast would not be possible without continuous support from my wife, Sandra. And thank you so much for listening. I hope the episode will inspire you to get out and see where the road leads you.
Mike: Madagascar, it’s probably one of my more favorite countries, as it turns out. It’s a fairly poor country, but the people are both curious and friendly and helpful.
Gabriel: Yeah, it sounds like a great destination, one we haven’t covered yet on the podcast.
Mike: There’s definitely the classic nature and you have to go get your lemur visit and make sure you see those.